Before the advent of the Internet, corporate data networks typically consisted of dedicated telecommunications lines leased from a public telephone company. Since the hardware implementation of the data networks was the exclusive property of the telephone company, a regulated utility having an absolute monopoly on the medium, security was not much of a problem; the single provider was contractually obligated to be secure, and the lack of access to the switching network from outside made it more or less resistant to external hacking and tampering.
Today, more and more enterprises are discovering the value of the Internet which is currently more widely deployed than any other single computer network in the world and is therefore readily available for use by a multinational corporate network. Since it is also a consumer-level product, Internet access can usually be provided at much lower cost than the same service provided by dedicated telephone company network. Finally, the availability of the Internet to the end user makes it possible for individuals to easily access the corporate network from home, or other remote locations.
The Internet however, is run by public companies, using open protocols, and in-band routing and control that is open to scrutiny. This environment makes it a fertile proving ground for hackers. Industrial espionage is a lucrative business today, and companies that do business on the Internet leave themselves open to attack unless they take precautions.
Several standards exist today for privacy and strong authentication on the Internet. Privacy is accomplished through encryption/decryption. Typically, encryption/decryption is performed based on algorithms which are intended to allow data transfer over an open channel between parties while maintaining the privacy of the message contents. This is accomplished by encrypting the data using an encryption key by the sender and decrypting it using a decryption key by the receiver. In symmetric key cryptography, the encryption and decryption keys are the same, whereas in public key cryptography the encryption and decryption keys are different.
Types of Encryption Algorithms
Encryption algorithms are typically classified into public-key and secret key algorithms. In secret-key algorithms, keys are secret whereas in public-key algorithms, one of the keys is known to the general public. Block ciphers are representative of the secret-key cryptosystems in use today. A block cipher takes a block of data, for example 32-128 bits, as input data and produces the same number of bits as output data. The encryption and decryption operations are performed using the key, having a length typically in the range of 56-128 bits. The encryption algorithm is designed such that it is very difficult to decrypt a message without knowing the exact value of the key.
In addition to block ciphers, Internet security protocols also rely on public-key based algorithms. A public key cryptosystem such as the Rivest, Shamir, Adelman (RSA) cryptosystem described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,144,667 issued to Pogue and Rivest uses two keys, one of which is secret—private—and the other of which is publicly available. Once someone publishes a public key, anyone may send that person a secret message encrypted using that public key; however, decryption of the message can only be accomplished by use of the private key. The advantage of such public-key encryption is private keys are not distributed to all parties of a conversation beforehand. In contrast, when symmetric encryption is used, multiple secret keys are generated, one for each party intended to receive a message, and each secret key is privately communicated. Attempting to distribute secret keys in a secure fashion results in a similar problem as that faced in sending the message using only secret-key encryption; this is typically referred to as the key distribution problem.
Key exchange is another application of public-key techniques. In a key exchange protocol, two parties can agree on a secret key even if their conversation is intercepted by a third party. The Diffie-Hellman exponential key exchange method, described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,200,770, is an example of such a protocol.
Most public-key algorithms, such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman key exchange, are based on modular exponentiation, which is the computation of αx mod p. This expression means “multiply α by itself x times, divide the answer by p, and take the remainder.” This is very computationally expensive to perform for the following reason: In order to perform this operation, many repeated multiplication operations and division operations are required. Techniques such as Montgomery's method, described in “Modular Multiplication Without Trial Division,” from Mathematics of Computation, Vol. 44, No. 170 of April 1985, can reduce the number of division operations required but do not overcome this overall computational expense. In addition, for present day encryption systems the numbers used are very large (typically 1024 bits or more), so the multiply and divide instructions found in common CPUs cannot be used directly. Instead, special algorithms that break down the large multiplication operations and division operations into operations small enough to be performed on a CPU are used. These algorithms usually have a run time proportional to the square of the number of machine words involved. These factors result in multiplication of large numbers being a very slow operation. For example, a Pentium® processor can perform a 32×32-bit multiply in 10 clock cycles. A 2048-bit number can be represented in 64 32-bit words. A 2048×2048-bit multiply requires 64×64 separate 32×32-bit multiplication operations, which takes 40960 clocks on the Pentium® processor assuming no pipeline processing is performed. An exponentiation with a 2048-bit exponent requires up to 4096 multiplication operations if done in the straightforward fashion, which requires about 167 million clock cycles. If the Pentium processor is running at 166 MHZ, the entire operation requires roughly one second. Of course, the division operations add further time to the overall computation times. Clearly, a common CPU such as a Pentium cannot expect to do key generation and exchange at any great rate.
Because public-key algorithms are so computationally intensive, they are typically not used to encrypt entire messages. Instead, private-key cryptosystems are used for message transfer. The private key used to encrypt the message, called the session key, is chosen at random and encrypted using a public key. The encrypted session key and the encrypted message are then sent to the other party. The other party uses its private key to decrypt the session key, and then the message is decrypted using the session key. A different session key is used for each communication, so that if security of a session key is ever breached, only the one message encrypted therewith is accessible. This public-key/private-key method is also useful to protect continuous streams of data within communications, such as interactive terminal sessions that do not terminate in normal operation or that continue for extended periods of time. Preferably in this case, the session key is periodically changed by repeating the key exchange technique. Again, frequent changing of the session key limits the amount of data compromised when security of the session key is breached.